This is the text from our free study guide for the free booklet, Hope: The First Sunday of Advent.
We tend to use the word “hope” for two reasons: we want something good to happen (rather than something bad), and this good thing isn’t guaranteed to happen. Christians of course use the word in this way—we might hope to avoid illness, and yet nonetheless become sick—but our hope has a deeper meaning: we are confident that any suffering we endure now is finite, whereas our lives of enjoying and growing in the love of God are infinite; and this confidence is rooted in the supreme faithfulness of God. This is clearly stated in Paul’s epistle to the Romans, where our ultimate hope is “sharing in the glory of God” (5:2, NRSVue), and we have this hope “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (5:5, NRSVue).
Eternal life spent loving God and being loved by him, Thomas Aquinas says, is an infinite good; Christians look forward to an eternity of God imparting the ultimate goodness—himself—to each of us. Jesus Christ is therefore, in the words of Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus, the “Dear desire of ev’ry nation, Joy of ev’ry longing heart.” Despite many differences in belief and practice, J. C. Ryle, notes, Christians share in common the assurance that Christ—fully God and fully human—is “the only true foundation of a good hope.”
This hope in God isn’t just an insubstantial, dreamy wish for better things and better days. Instead, John Calvin teaches, we have a faith and hope fully grounded in God himself and his faithful interaction with his people. Faith looks to who God is and what he has done; hope looks to the future with the full confidence that God will continue to be faithful and fulfill his promises. Therefore, Calvin concludes, “faith is the foundation on which hope rests; hope nourishes and sustains faith.”
Notice some of the words used to describe the Christian hope: happiness; enjoyment; dear desire; refreshment. Our faith and hope, Cyprian of Carthage says, lift up our souls and give us joy. Both he and Jeremy Taylor emphasize that our lives should be strengthened by this hopeful joy, because through every moment of our lives, good and bad, God is working in us and expanding us for eternal happiness and enjoyment with him. Still more, this hopeful joy isn’t our sole possession, but is intended—in Taylor’s words—to be shared with all the world for “God’s glory and the great end of souls.”
We are an Advent people, living in an Advent world. We cry out with the first Christians, “Our Lord, come” (1 Cor 16:22, NRSVue) and “Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev 22:20, NRSVue), hopeful and confident in God’s promise of a renewal of all creation (Rev 21:1). This waiting is not a passive quietism, however; our Advent lives involve active waiting, joyfully working with the God who even now renews us and our world (Isa 43:19).
